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Overview

Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra’s new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his bestselling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.

Born in the midst of tragedy and violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, young Angelo Vestieri chooses to flee both his past and his father to seek a second family—the criminals who preside over early 20th century New York. In his bloody rise from soldier to mob boss, he encounters ever more barbaric betrayals—in friendship, in his brutal business, in love—yet simultaneously comes to understand the meaning of loyalty, the virtue of relationships, and gains a perspective on the lonely, if powerful, life he has chosen.

As the years pass, as enemies are made and defeated, as wars are fought and won, the old don meets an abandoned boy who needs a parent as much as protection. By taking Gabe under his wing and teaching him everything he knows, Angelo Vestieri will learn, in the winter of his life, which is greater: his love for the boy he cherishes, or his need to be a gangster and to live by the savage rules he helped create.

A sweeping panoramic with riveting characters, a unique understanding of the underworld philosophy, and a relentless pace, Gangster travels through the time of godfathers and goodfellas to our own world of suburban Sopranos. But this is more than just an authentic chronicle of crime. Setting a new standard for this acclaimed author, Gangster is a compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate—and an unforgettable epic of a family, a city, a century.

Product Details

About the Author

Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of the memoir A Safe Place, Apaches, and the New York Times bestseller Sleepers. He has written scripts for movies and television and is currently at work on his next novel.

From the Hardcover edition.

Read an Excerpt

Summer, 1906

He hated dredging up memories.

They did not stir in him a taste for nostalgia or loves lost. He saw in them only one purpose—to harden the shell he had chiseled with care, the one that hid all that could be deemed vulnerable and kept entombed the signs of humanity. When he talked to me about his early years, it was with the voice of a stranger, as if what had been had touched the life of another, one a safe distance removed from the fray. In the telling, his eyes never strayed beyond my face and his voice retained its deep pitch, no matter the emotional import of what was recalled.

I was ten when I first heard the story of his ocean crossing, and as I sat in the hospital room listening to Mary’s account of the tale, the early moments of the dying man’s life came exploding back, as real, as hard and as fresh as a wave.

His ship was three days out of Naples when the storm hit.

Four levels below the deck, walled-in against an overworked engine, six hundred men, women and children were crammed into a space designed for two hundred. The stench of waste mingled with that of burning oil and spouting steam. The cargo hold, normally a dry haven for luggage and sealed goods, was now little more than a moaning assembly of humanity. Families sat in small circles, huddled under tattered coverlets of soiled sheets and clothes. Infants wailed against the pangs of hunger and the nibbling of rats. The elderly chewed tobacco leaves instead of food, black spittle coarsing down their chins. Women, young and old, sang Neapolitan ballads to lift deadened spirits and prayed daily to a stern God for a quick end to a dark journey.

They boarded the ship under a blanket of darkness, paying twenty-five thousand lira—nearly five hundred dollars— per head to a local broker, Giorgio Salvecci, an overweight landlord who kept a tan overcoat draped over his shoul- ders regardless of season. Salvecci shipped skins—Italian immigrants—across the Atlantic Ocean and into the harbors of New York, Boston and Baltimore. At the turn of the century, during the height of the Italian migration to American soil, Salvecci and his crew of thugs sent fifteen hundred transports a week off to an uncertain future. They were openly indifferent to their customers’ ultimate fates; their part of the bargain ended with the payment of under-the-table cash. In return for a few thousand extra lira, Salvecci could also be counted on to supply false documents that would be rubber-stamped at Ellis Island and other points of entry, allowing the less-than-desirable access to the Golden Land.

Convicts, thieves, con men and murderers: all, eventually, made their way to Salvecci. He was their last hope, all that separated them from a long stretch behind the hard bars of an Italian prison.

The ships commissioned by Salvecci to cross the Atlantic were beaten and worn-down cruisers that had seen far better years and far more magnificent voyages. What once had been the pride of a vibrant fleet had been reduced through neglect into ocean-chugging pimps, rushing loads of human hope and misery toward a mysterious new country. The ships had majestic names culled from a more glorious past to cart along with their deteriorating bodies—Il Leonardo, La Vittoria Colonna, La Regina Isabella, Il Marco Polo. They had once carried the gold of Venetian merchants across the angry seas of the Adriatic. Now, weighed down with age, they swam slowly over the Atlantic.

The passengers were fed once a day, in the late afternoon, by a large, muscular man covered from forehead to ankles in tattoos. His name was Italo and he came from a northern mountain region known more for rugged terrain than culinary expertise. It would take Italo a dozen trips to fill the bowls of the hungry, as he lumbered down narrow steel steps, carrying a large pot filled with hot stew. He dipped the bowls into the scalding liquid and scampered away, leaving them to devour what he knew to be a meal unfit for animals. On occasion, he would throw large chunks of old bread into the hole and watch dirty hands dive for the delicacy.

Passengers built small fires around which they’d circle, using old wood and clothes in an attempt to stay warm and keep their children safe. It was an eight-day journey of pain, but one that each person on that stifling deck desperately needed to complete. They were leaving behind a land of dry soil and little promise for a place where, they were told, every one of their dreams would come true. That is what they needed to believe, what would give them the courage to go on as around them grandfathers died in silence and infants wailed their last breaths.

The dream of America was more than enough to make Paolino Vestieri want to live. Vestieri was a thirty-six-year-old shepherd from Salerno who had seen a thriving flock of three hundred reduced to a half-dozen, victims of hunger, thieves and sickness. He had an eight-year-old son, Carlo, and a wife, Francesca, eight months pregnant with their second child. Despite the daily difficulties, Paolino had no plans to leave Italy. But then, in the late winter of 1906, his father, Giacamo, was ambushed by a band of camorristas—the Neapolitan Mafia. Ignoring his pleas for more time to pay off a long-standing debt, they stripped him nude, hung him from an olive tree and sliced open his stomach. It would be three days before Paolino got word about his father and was able to find his body, and by then the crows and maggots had had their fill. When he returned home, he found Carlo missing and his wife screaming in ways he had never heard a woman cry before.

“They took Carlo!” she shrieked. “They took my son!”

“Who took him?” Paolino asked, grabbing his wife.

“The camorra,” Francesca managed to shout between screams. “They took my boy. They took him for the money your father owed. The money we cannot pay.”

“Stop your crying,” Paolino said, removing his hands from his wife and heading for the bedroom to get his lupara. “I will get Carlo.”

Francesca fell to her knees, still crying, head cradled in her hands. “I want my son,” she moaned. “I want my son. If they want revenge, tell them to take it from your father. Not from my boy.”

“They have already taken it from my father,” Paolino said, checking the lupara for shells as he walked past his wife and out the door.

• • •

Paolino stood in the center of the small dining room, his eyes on his son and the man standing above him, smoking a thin cigar. The man inched the cigar from his mouth, curls of smoke clouding his thick, tanned face. He patted the top of Carlo’s head.

“He’s a good boy,” the man said, smiling. “Very quiet. No trouble to us. He’s almost a part of the family already.”

“I will get you your money, Gaspare,” Paolino said, the lupara hanging over his shoulder, partly hidden by the sleeve of his shepherd’s coat. “I give you my word. Now, please. Let me have my son.”

“Your father gave his word, too,” Gaspare said. “Many times. And I am still left with nothing. Besides, the boy will know a better life with us. We can give much more than you. And with your father out of the way, you will no longer have to live in debt. At least to us.”

Paolino looked down at his son and remembered the early mornings when he would lift him onto his shoulders and carry him down the slopes of the olive groves toward his flock. His head was filled with the happy sounds of a boy’s laughter, as he urged his father to go faster and catch up to the grazing sheep. That brief and blissful memory was quickly replaced by the image of a grown Carlo, now a hardened member of the camorra, glowering at him from the top of that very same olive grove, standing tall and silent as men with guns raced to fill their pockets with the wages of the working poor. Paolino Vestieri knew he must never allow the son he loved so much to grow up to be such a man.

He stepped closer to Gaspare and his son, ignoring the two men standing on either side of the room. “One way or another,” Paolino said, “my son will come with me.”

“You talk like a brave man.” Gaspare put the cigar back in his mouth, his voice turned harder. “But your actions will show where your courage takes you.”

“Let me have my son,” Paolino said, feeling the sweat race down his neck and back.

“I have no more to say to you.” Gaspare dismissed Paolino with a wave. “Tend to your flock, shepherd. Let me worry about the boy.”

Paolino fell to his knees and swung the lupara from his back to his hands. But he did not aim it at the criminal Gaspare. The gun was aimed directly at his son’s chest. The two men in the corner pulled their own handguns and aimed it at Paolino. Gaspare backed away from the boy, his smoldering cigar now cupped in his right hand. Carlo stared at his father, his lower lip quivering.

“You would kill your own blood?” Gaspare asked. “Your only son?”

“Better for him to be dead than to live with you,” Pao- lino said.

“You don’t have the heart for such a move,” Gaspare said. “I don’ t even know if I do.”

“Then save him and let him come home with me.”

Gaspare stared at Paolino for several minutes, glaring into his eyes, taking slow puffs off the cigar.

“No,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

Paolino turned away from Gaspare and looked at his son. It was as if the two of them were now alone. The hard gaze of the boy’s eyes told his father all that he felt he needed to know. It would not take the camorra long to steal the young boy’s spirit and turn it against those he loved. They would seduce him with romanticized images of power and wealth, easily lure the child in with vivid portraits of a life much more alluring and appealing than that of a shepherd’s son. It would be a corrupt life, one without scruples or morals or decency. They had not had enough time to completely tear the boy away from him, not yet, but Paolino could see that such a path had already been paved. The boy would be a thief, a criminal and, one day, a murderer.

“I love you, Carlo,” Paolino said and squeezed the trigger.

He watched as the bullet’s impact sent his son hard against the stone fireplace. Carlo crumpled to the ground, his face inches from the sparks of the crackling wood, his eyes half-open, dead from his father’s hand.

“Now he belongs to no one,” Paolino said.

He tossed aside the lupara and walked toward the fireplace. He bent down, picked his son up in his arms, turned and left.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
In his succinctly titled second novel, Gangster, Lorenzo Carcaterra (Sleepers, A Safe Place) turns his hand to an archetypal story: the evolution of a powerful American crime lord. An episodic narrative that ranges from turn-of-the-century Salerno to contemporary New York, Gangster recounts the life and times of Angelo Vestieri, a poor Italian immigrant who achieves a distorted version of the American Dream.

The novel begins in 1996. Angelo, who is 90 years old and has outlived his enemies and friends alike, is dying by degrees in a Manhattan hospital. At his bedside are Gabe, an orphan and de facto member of the Vestieri family, and Mary, an enigmatic older woman who was once Angelo's lover. Their combined reminiscences form the substance of the narrative, which recapitulates, in fragmented fashion, the high points of Angelo's career.

A key element of the story takes place in 1906, when Angelo's father, an impoverished shepherd named Paolino Vestieri, murders Carlo, his eight-year-old son, rather than allow the boy to fall under the influence of a local Mafia chieftain. Paolino then flees to America with his pregnant wife, who dies giving birth to Angelo during a stormy Atlantic crossing. Father and son eventually settle in the slums of New York and begin to pursue their vastly different destinies.

The law-abiding Paolino takes on a series of menial jobs, while Angelo encounters the three individuals who will shape, and warp, his life: a streetwise Irish delinquent named Pudge Nichols; a hard-edged, maternal tavern owner known as Ida the Goose; and Angus McQueen, a leading figure in the Manhattan underworld. Angus gives Angelo his first real "job" and his first taste of the highflying gangster lifestyle. From that point forward, the novel takes us through Angelo's rise from small-time hoodlum to embattled
ruler of a lucrative, illicit empire. His volatile career encompasses gang warfare, murder, and personal betrayal, and reflects several decades of radical social change. It also costs him almost everything he values and isolates him permanently from the "civilian" world of family, friendship, and everyday human concerns.

Gangster is not an especially literary book. The prose is serviceable but not eloquent, the dialogue often stilted, and the basic material a shade too familiar. It is, however, an intensely cinematic novel that moves swiftly and cleanly through an extended series of vivid set pieces, most of which should play very effectively in the four-hour miniseries currently in development. Gangster may lack the mythical resonance of The Godfather, but it's an energetic, headlong narrative that offers some violent, visceral pleasures of its own.

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

bn.com

"I was now well-prepared to be a career criminal... I just didn't have the stomach for any of it." Carcaterra's latest crime novel is the tantalizing coming-of-age story of orphan Gabe, groomed by longtime New York City mob boss Angelo Vestieri to be his successor. The novel opens in the 1990s as Gabe, now middle-aged, keeps watch over Vestieri on his hospital deathbed. Slipping back in time to the Depression, the narrative tracks the rise of the famed mob boss from Italian immigrant to lord of Manhattan's underworld, when Gabe, 10, walks into Vestieri's bar after running out on his latest foster parents in 1964. Vestieri takes the impressionable boy under his wing and ushers him into the world of organized crime. Gabe runs numbers, collects debts and learns loyalty and the price of betrayal. Yet when the time comes for Gabe to take over the operation, he refuses, choosing a normal life despite his deep love for Vestieri. As he did in Sleepers and Apaches, Carcaterra shows dexterity in humanizing the denizens of the urban underbelly. Through a fine characterization of the enigmatic Vestieri, he provides a stirring perspective on the ways of mobsters and their history. Yet the book's central theme, the complex choice facing Gabe, is poorly developed, rarely penetrating the surface of his rejection of gang life. Carcaterra's portrayal focuses primarily on violence as the source of Gabe's revulsion, only touching on Gabe's understanding of how mobsters--through fear and corruption--influence society in much deeper ways. (Feb. 1) Forecast: From its bold title and catchy cover to the publisher's plans for major ad/promo, including a six-city author tour, this novel promises to perform. Its major push, though, will come down the road, from a four-hour ABC miniseries already in the works. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Covering a span of 90 years, Carcaterra (Sleepers) spins a dry and somewhat predictable tale of two generations of a Mob "family." Boss Angelo Vestieri lies dying in a hospital bed with two visitors by his side. One is Gabe, a man who as a child had been befriended and ultimately raised by Angelo. The other is Mary, initially introduced as a mysterious woman from Angelo's past who has come to witness his death. Through their recollections, we learn first of Angelo's rise from street urchin to boss, then of the development of his relationship with Gabe. By the novel's end, the ties among all three have been neatly explained, providing excellent closure to the story. What prevents the book from becoming truly compelling is the triteness of its characters, who seem to lack complexity in their behavior and who evoke no sympathy from the reader. Despite its shortcomings, Carcaterra's latest should still move in public libraries, especially among readers who enjoy gangster novels and also because it is scheduled to be a four-hour ABC minseries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/00.]--Craig L. Shufelt, Gladwin Cty. Lib., MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Over the decades, powerful mob boss Angelo Vestieri has defeated many an enemy by insuring close ties with his allies. However, the ravages of time and illness have taken their toll and by 1996, Angelo lies dying in a hospital bed. His prot‚g‚, Gabe loves Angelo like a father. However, Gabe cannot stomach the "family" business that he does not want to lead.Gabe thinks back to 1964 when as a ten year old he ran away from his latest foster parents and meets Angelo. The mob kingpin immediately sees something in the lad that he fails to observe in his own children. He "adopts" Gabe, whose job description includes number running and debt collection. Angelo instills values such as loyalty and honesty with one's friends in Gabe who truly loves his mentor. Gabe also hears stories about Angelo's coming to America at the beginning of the century and his rise as a crime boss. However, that does not mean the life of a Gangster is the lifestyle chosen by Gabe who wants to go straight. Gangster is an excellent portrayal of the life of a mob kingpin. The story line is exciting and character driven as the audience sees deep inside Angelo and to a lesser degree, his family and Gabe. However, best-selling author Lorenzo Carcaterra could have provided a better character analysis of Gabe for genre fans. That way, they would have a better understanding of the schism that splits Gabe's soul between his loathing of the mob life and his intense love and loyalty for the man who embodies its value system.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ.....ONCE I STARTED I WAS HOOKED.......EASY READING AND WONDERFUL FLOW.....

italian-bella

More than 1 year ago

If you love hte mafia era, then you will love tis book.

great!!

one of the best books ive ever read.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

I recommend this book to anyone who like has lived through a life of crime. I absolutely love this book because i can relate to most of the things and situations that angelo and gabe go through.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

Honestly, I don't even know where to start. It was just that good.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

its an amazing book read the book in 2 days could not put it down must read

Guest

More than 1 year ago

One of the best books I have ever read. The characters jump off the pages and you feel as if you are standing there watching it all unfold. Mr. Carcaterra has done it again. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

This book was so moving that I wept when the characters wept and laughed when they laughed. I fell in love with the characters. The author did such a wonderful job of relating true history with a good plot. I loved it, loved it, loved it!!!!!!

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

You won't forget these characters!
aj west

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

NOT the terrorist

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

This book had a lot of flaws. In many instaces it lacked credability. In some places it was so boring I had to skip paragraphs. It lacked all the drama and intriege of the GODFATHER. Does not even come close. I don' t know lf Lorenzo knows how murder plots take place or just didn't think them through. Go read The Hoods by Harry Grey.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

This book is what got me back in to reading, its a fantastic novel that gives layers to your gangster archytypes. Beautifuly written and thought provoking Gangster is a book I would reccomend to anyone interested within the mafia ideals

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

We are moving camp to dancer all results! All the areas are at the same results here. Haave a good night.

LennyV

More than 1 year ago

Thought it was a good read that keep you interested and wondering what would happen on the next page.

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